45 cows test negative for mad cow disease at a farm in northern Japan Canadian PressPublished: Monday, February 13, 2006

Font: * * * * TOKYO (AP) - Forty-five cows at a farm in northern Japan thought to be infected with mad cow disease had all tested negative for the brain-wasting ailment, Japanese authorities said Monday.

The herd was from a farm in the town of Bekkai on the northern island of Hokkaido, where a cow died last month of the disease - Japan's 22nd mad cow case. The dead cow was not raised for food and posed no danger to Japan's beef supply.

Under Japanese government guidelines on handling infected cattle, Hokkaido authorities said Saturday they treated the 45 cows as suspected disease carriers.

Tests on parts of brains taken from the 45 cows found that they were all cleared of the mad cow disease, also called bovine spongiform encephalopathy, said Hokkaido government official Hiroyuki Takeuchi.

With the results, the local government lifted a ban on the farm from moving any of the rest of the cows raised at the farm involved, Takeuchi said.

The guidelines call for any cattle given the same feed and raised in the same pen for the first year of life with a cow that tests positive to be destroyed as an infected animal.

Calves born within two years of the discovery of mad cow among their herd are also treated as suspected infection cases.

Takeuchi said the 45 cows were being destroyed at a livestock health centre on Hokkaido.

The cow that died in January in Hokkaido was fed with meat-bone meal - the first known use of such feed in Japan since it was banned in 2001, government officials have said. The case also marks the first time the feed's use has been linked to a mad cow-infected animal in Japan.

Officials are investigating how the meal came to be used, he said.

Last month, Japan halted all imports of U.S. beef following the discovery of backbones in a shipment of American veal. The bones are deemed to be at risk of mad cow disease and are banned under a deal that reopened the Japanese market to U.S. beef in December.